Fantastic Fest has revealed its 2026 lineup, and the calendar for September just got considerably more crowded.
The 21st edition runs September 17 through 24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, Texas. Festival director Lisa Dreyer framed the year around discovery, promising audiences “the next batch of breakout Directors.”
That is the sort of thing festivals always say. What makes it worth believing here is the shape of the lineup, which is stacked with world premieres from filmmakers most people have not heard of yet and comparatively light on brand names.
Below are the titles horror fans should be circling. This is not the whole lineup, which is enormous.
Opening night: Beware Boiúna
The festival opens with the world premiere of Lionsgate’s Beware Boiúna from Mike P. Nelson, whose Silent Night, Deadly Night played the fest previously. A medical mission deep in the Amazon becomes a survival problem when Boiúna, an enormous ancient predator, wakes up and starts deciding who lives.
It is a big creature feature with a studio behind it, and it is the right kind of opener. Fantastic Fest crowds are the best possible audience for a giant snake movie.
Resident Evil gets the gala slot
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil screens as a gala at 93 minutes. The timing is almost comically tight, since the film opens nationwide on September 18. Austin gets it by roughly one day.
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier whose delivery run collapses into one very bad night. Cregger co-wrote with Shay Hatten. Whether a franchise reboot needs a festival berth is debatable. Whether the Drafthouse crowd will lose its mind for it is not.
Carrie, in two episodes
Mike Flanagan’s Carrie gets its U.S. premiere with two episodes screening as a 101 minute block. The adaptation moves the story into the social media era, building the humiliation around a viral bullying scandal rather than a locker room.
Flanagan has never done Stephen King badly. Stretching Carrie across a series is the kind of structural swing that either justifies itself immediately or does not, and two episodes is enough to tell.
Anna Biller returns
The Face of Horror is the U.S. premiere of Anna Biller’s new film, running a substantial 120 minutes. A vain knight murders his wife and learns that killing her was the easy part.
Biller writes, directs, designs and generally builds her films by hand, and nobody else makes anything that looks like The Love Witch. This is the most interesting thing in the lineup for anyone who cares about horror as craft.
River
Joshua Giuliano’s River arrives as a U.S. premiere at 92 minutes, after opening TIFF’s Midnight Madness genre slate. Three estranged siblings reunite to scatter their father’s ashes on a remote river, then the boat quits on them.
Grief plus wilderness plus a boat that will not start is a durable formula. The Midnight Madness slot suggests it does more than the formula.
The Swallow
Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer bring a world premiere at 82 minutes. A sentient sludge that behaves like quicksand hunts a group of young people, and the festival bills it as effects forward and brutally efficient.
These are the Starry Eyes directors. A creature feature from them at barely 80 minutes is exactly what a festival audience should get first.
The Indonesian double feature
Ghost in the Cell is Joko Anwar’s North American premiere, 106 minutes of supernatural horror crossed with a prison thriller, martial arts and political satire. Anwar made Satan’s Slaves and Impetigore. He does not do restraint, and a prison gives him walls to bounce off.
Janur Ireng: Sewu Dino the Prequel is Kimo Stamboel’s North American premiere at 94 minutes, reaching back to the ritual that started the curse, with two siblings caught in a scheme run by their own wealthy relatives.
The Heretiks
Gregg Bishop has a world premiere at 89 minutes. A coven bent on the apocalypse marks Ada’s younger sister for sacrifice, so Ada allies with a witch who has broken ranks.
Bishop made Dance of the Dead and builds horror that moves fast and does not sulk. Witch movies have skewed slow and mournful for a decade, so a propulsive one is welcome.
Two for the found footage crowd
Compliance is a North American premiere from Kyle Mangione-Smith at 104 minutes, in which a corporate client relations rep pulls one loose thread and finds a conspiracy underneath. Found footage plus office drudgery is a combination almost nobody attempts.
In the microbudget Burnt Ends section, James Cullen Bressack brings the world premiere of I Have Proof at 76 minutes. The entire official description is that a man named Alex has proof and wants you to see it.
The VHS bracket
Two world premieres are digging through old tapes, and they are not the same movie.
Play House comes from Nicolas Jon Curcio and won the 2025 Fantastic Pitches. A man renovating a wrecked house finds tapes of a children’s show that never aired, and its history starts bleeding into his life.
Posthumous is Josh Tanner’s Australian world premiere at 110 minutes. Zoe comes home to an estranged father and a stack of birthday videos her late mother recorded, then finds an occult ritual underneath the story she was told about that death.
What Happened to Doris?
Nick Simon’s world premiere runs 92 minutes and returns to the case that inspired The Entity, following a single mother whose attacks by an unseen force pull UCLA investigators into one of the country’s most notorious paranormal files. Adapting the real case rather than remaking the 1982 film is the more interesting choice, and the harder one to get right.
Period horror is having a year
The Ones Who Grieve is Quarxx’s North American premiere at 116 minutes, set at the end of the 19th century as a plague moves through the countryside and a young woman fights out from under a fanatically religious father. Quarxx made All the Gods in the Sky, which is about as bleak as French genre film gets.
Upiro is a Spanish world premiere from Óscar Martín, 106 minutes, sending a woman to a remote monastery to atone during the Enlightenment, where a blood disease turns out to be tied to an upyr.
A Prayer for the Dying is a North American premiere set in rural Wisconsin in 1870, with a Civil War haunted sheriff facing a plague and encroaching wildfires.
Queer horror, new and restored
Corpus is a U.S. premiere from Corrin Evans at 102 minutes, in which a party at a remote estate turns supernatural, erotic and violent in roughly that order. No Rest for the Wicked is a Danish U.S. premiere where a love affair between a rescued man and the whaler who saved him requires sacrifices to an Elder God.
On the archival side, Rufus Butler Seder’s 1984 Screamplay gets a 4K restoration world premiere, and Todd Verow’s 1995 Frisk gets the North American premiere of its restoration.
The restorations are stacked
The American Genre Film Archive brings a 4K restoration of Blood Feast, Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 1963 film and the first splatter movie ever made, plus a world premiere of a new 35mm print of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer struck for the film’s 40th anniversary, plus a restoration of the Y2K documentary Hell House with director George Ratliff in person.
Bleeding Skull presents a restoration of Ogroff, Norbert Moutier’s 1983 French underground slasher. If you have only seen it as a fuzzy bootleg, this is the event of the week.
Also on the radar
Red Snow, a Finnish world premiere about a vampire posing as Santa Claus and the teenage daughter who wants to join him. Death of a Yellow Bird from Cody Calahan, a world premiere ghost story about a dying man filming messages for his son. Roma Elastica, Bertrand Mandico’s North American premiere with Marion Cotillard. The Spiral from Paolo Strippoli, a U.S. premiere about a twenty year old bargain coming due. Pathetic Fallacy, Adam Egypt Mortimer’s world premiere about a widower trying to bring his wife back. Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss, a Canadian world premiere billed as grimdark fantasy performed entirely by puppets.
Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine takes a Texas premiere slot. Not horror, but it will be the hardest ticket in the building.
The events are not an afterthought
The opening night party runs on synthpunk band Drakulas. There is an Evil Laugh Competition presented by the Blerdy Massacre podcast, live recordings from Doug Loves Movies and The Kingcast, and a horror conversation with Rotten Tomatoes. Closing night is a GWAR concert, which may be the most Fantastic Fest sentence ever written.
What this lineup tells us
The center of gravity has moved. One studio creature feature opens, one franchise reboot gets a gala, and after that it is a long tail of world premieres from directors without name recognition.
The international side is where the ambition sits. Indonesia, France, Spain, Finland, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, India and Australia all turn up with films that are not chasing an American template. Meanwhile the American independents are working in old formats, found footage and VHS and occult ritual, and finding room left in them.
What is missing matters too. No franchise sequel anchors the week. Whether that reflects programming taste or the state of the studio horror pipeline is worth watching.
iHorror will be covering Fantastic Fest 2026 from Austin, with reviews and reporting throughout the festival.
